The Do-Right (5 page)

IV
IV

“MORNING, MISS WADE.”

“Morning, Mr. Phelan.”

Monday, Delpha Wade wore the same white blouse as on Friday but with another color skirt, green print, kind of swirly. Well, it was swirly when she walked but when she stood still, putting her purse into a desk drawer, it hung straight down.

This morning, awkwardness presented itself. Until the business got established, got rolling, him going in and out, her taking calls and writing notes on office paper—they would sit around, wouldn't they? Him in the boss office and her in the secretary office, him reading the paper and her—what would she do? The two girls he'd interviewed before her, they could have sat out here without a thought from him, why not her?

There was one thing to start with.

“Why don't you call me Tom?”

Miss Wade sat down in the secretary chair and scooted up to the desk. The rosy grace on her cheeks he'd spied Friday was banished now. The woman held herself like she wore strands of invisible barbwire, even though she knew she'd walk out the door at five o'clock, not in five years.

“First names maybe doesn't look so good for your clients,” she said, indicating the door, as if clients were piled up on the stairs, clutching little paper numbers in their fists. She took a
couple sheets of paper out of a side drawer, slipped a carbon in between, tapped all the edges even against the desk and carefully wound them into the typewriter.

What did she plan to type?

“Well, using last names sounds so
old
. And when there's no clients here—if we're just sitting here by ourselves saying Miss Wade this and Mr. Phelan that, I'm gonna feel like I'm back in homeroom.” He shifted his shoulders in the suit jacket, just that little bit too tight. Maybe he should have bought a 42. But then it would have hung in the belly section.

She took in what he had to say, nodded and began to type. She stopped when she noticed Phelan looking at her. “Bill for Mrs. Toups,” she said.

“She paid me a hundred to start and rate's only seventy-five a day. I owe her.”

Miss Wade pushed a button and the typewriter zinged back to another line.

“What?”

“Well, how much that flashlight cost that you left at the house where you found the kid?”

“I don't know. Maybe three dollars.”

“That's an expense, Mr. Phelan.”

So much for the informality angle.

“How far you say you drove? Gas high as it is, that's an expense you always charge for.”

She was right. Phelan estimated the distances: the high school, the port, Dennis Deeterman's menagerie house, the hospital, back here. No, he shouldn't charge for driving back here. He subtracted those miles and gave her the total.

She pulled out a desk drawer, took a pencil and a ten-cent sharpener, sharpened and did the multiplication. Typed it in. “Now what about your pants?”

“What about my pants?” Phelan looked down. The suit came with two pair, and he didn't even have to get them hemmed. Thirty-two waist/thirty-four length, they were OK as far as he could see.

Miss Wade suppressed a smile. “The ones the raccoon ripped. You get them fixed, that's an expense, too.” She spoke a silent word to herself, squinted, spoke another and hit the keys five times.

Phelan was losing the loft he'd earned last Friday evening. He felt like they were writing a treaty.

“Now at the beginning, I'll put what you did, like a summary of how you found that boy. Then the rate and the expenses. What do you want me to write at the end—‘Thank you for your business'? Or something like that. ‘Your business is appreciated'?” Her eyes tightened as she considered.

He understood then that the gold-stickered certificate from Gatesville's business training course that she'd slid across his desk was no light thing to Delpha Wade. It was her get-out-of-jail promise card, her elevator out of the dungeon, and it came with standards, rules, and obligations.

“I don't know about that
Thank you
. You were selling pipe or hardware, OK, but not in this business.” Phelan walked over to the secondhand plaid couch in front of the secretary's window. No Rosemont gents taking the air, just the downtown regular, skinny Miss Doris with her sacks and bags and her little gray goatee, resting her restless self.

He turned. “I guess what I mean, that release letter they gave you from Gatesville—they didn't end it with ‘Y'all come back now'.”

The gray-blue eyes lifted. The storm—the one far out on the Gulf that he'd seen in her eyes when she first presented herself, that had moved a ways out to sea by this morning—it was back.

For a minute. Then her lips pursed. “So…being as Mrs. Toups' business was her kid getting messed up, you don't wanna thank her for that.”

Phelan spread his hands. “What I'm thinking.”

“You're the boss.” She figured again and typed in a total, removed the sheets and carbon. Handed him one of the sheets.

“Mrs. Toups owes
me
seven dollars?”

Proper as a witch-candidate soft-talking a Puritan elder, Miss Wade explained that Mrs. Toups owed the business seven dollars. He should start thinking that way because
Phelan Investigations
wasn't the exact same thing as Thomas Phelan. It had a mouth, and it had to eat too. And some more things, she said, flicking him a glance.

Phelan nodded for her to go on.

Number one, he really ought to have letterhead. It was classy. Number two, the Toups boy might be messed up, but Phelan didn't do it. Phelan had given Ricky the only chance he had to get on with his life again. And number three, she had called Mrs. Lloyd Elliott and suggested a ten a.m. appointment at the office on a day convenient to the client. Next week, Mrs. Elliott had said. But she preferred ten at night and Leon's, a bar down on College.

Phelan appreciated item number two. As for the postponement, the ten p.m. appointment, he shrugged. “Next week. Her bucks, her say. What?” he asked when he noticed the little shake of her head.

“Oh, nothing.”

“No, what?”

“Never mind.”

“Can't leave me hanging, Miss Wade. I'm the curious kind.”

“Just that…used to know a girl had worked for an oilman's wife. She told me that how that woman spent her days was
choosing. Furniture for a beach house, color of a new car, where to go on a vacation. Kinda funny, huh?” She reached for the phone. “Choosing all day.”

Choosing. He hadn't ever thought about it, but now he did. Considered his years on the rigs, slipping in mud, twelve-hour day then dragged out of bed, get your ass out there, boy, zero to ninety in no seconds, get ahold of this pipe. Didn't like it, he was free to quit. Not so in the army. Neither did Miss Wade there have the option to quit Gatesville. Some people'd see it different: she'd had the option not to slice up a bleeding man.

Phelan didn't know if that was true or not.

At noon he needed to get out. Miss Wade was eating a sandwich at her desk, studying pictures in a book. Phelan glanced at a colorful one. “Looks like a glass jigsaw puzzle.”

“Dragonfly wings. And”—she smoothed over a page like it might shatter—“here's a vase like a peacock feather.” She looked up. “See why I like libraries.”

“Cause you can go anywhere free?”

“Huh. They let you take stuff. And when books talk, which they don't unless you want 'em to, you don't know what they're going to say.”

He went off to the printer where he'd got his business cards and did some choosing: typeface and layout for letterhead. Then he went over to visit the
Beaumont Enterprise
's archive and asked the clerk barricaded behind a little television to pull any article or photo she could find on Mr. Lloyd Elliott. Miss Wade could have done it for him, but he didn't feel like sitting. The pretty, gray-haired woman had to wrench herself from the TV.

“You're not watching this?” she asked. “I can't take my eyes off it.”

Her back was crooked. She hobbled off and pulled articles. Phelan stepped around to check out the television. Right. The Watergate hearings. Bunch of suits crammed together at a long, paper-littered table, everybody with their own silver microphone. Glarey lights. Phelan fiddled with the antenna. The black and white picture sharpened on Sam Ervin reading from a sheaf of papers and, down the way, some politico trapping a pencil between his upper lip and his nose.

The gray-haired woman handed over a file and hustled behind the TV.

The business-section articles were sparse-written. Near as Phelan could understand, Lloyd Elliott, attorney-at-law, had just handled an industrial espionage case. A small outfit called Daughtry Petrochemical had sued Enroco Oil over a formula brewed up in their meager Research and Development department. That formula had allegedly ducked out of Daughtry and snuck into the broad back door of Enroco Baytown. Little Daughtry's lawyers, Lloyd Elliott in the lead, hollered. Enroco thundered back. Dinwoodie, Blanchette, Elliott, and Klein conferred, schemed, burned the green-shaded law lamps late into the night, aiming to knock mammoth Enroco to the ground and blow on their slingshots. Enroco, brandishing sword, spear, and legions of lawyers, raised up on giant thighs.

This is where Phelan got lost. Enroco didn't, for some reason, bestow the death stroke. As far as he could tell, the colossus had lumbered down the slope to hunker with the runt. There was an abrupt end to the lawsuit. A settlement, must be. The amount didn't make the paper, but one third of whatever-it-was would have settled into the bank account of DBE&K. Case closed, champagne flutes overflowing, on to sticking it to somebody else.

Which was why Mrs. Lloyd Elliott wanted to talk to him. Lloyd was sticking it to somebody else.

May and still under ninety. He slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked down past the City Auditorium—where red, white, yellow, and pink rose buds conspired, getting ready to riot together—to the police headquarters. The senior sergeant on the desk buzzed Uncle E.E. and then sat grinning at Phelan.

Phelan said, “What?”

The alarm should have rung on the sergeant's retirement right around 1964. The shaggy gray eyebrows rose, innocence descended. Phelan had already experienced the look from Joe Ford down at the parole office. The previously unconsidered possibility of Joe mentioning his job referral to E.E. and E.E. gabbing it around the station hit Phelan, presenting itself as a crimp in his temple.
Forever hold your peace, buddy
, he thought, and did an excellent job of minding his own business.

The grinner busted. “Delpha Wade,” he said. “Boy, you got two large ones, you.”

Another member of the Napoleonic brotherhood
. Mildly, Phelan said, “What God give you, you got to bear.”

“Put 'er here, son. George Fontenot.” The old cop stuck out his hand.

“Tom Phelan. Good to meet you, sir.”

“I know who you are, cher. I worked that case. 1959. You know what was the fatal flaws?”

“Miss Wade and I hadn't exactly discussed it.”

“What was wrong was this.” He held up two fingers. “She didn't take out the old man, and they sent her to the Do-Right. That girl'd already done right.”

“Sure handed her a jolt. Anything to do with her finishing off a dying man?”

“Hell, everbody has their bad days.”

“Did you tell me E.E. was in, and I missed it?”

“Come to think on it, that one's right down the hall.” He pointed the way.

“Genuine pleasure to meet you, Sergeant.”

“Cain't argue there.” Fontenot winked.

Uncle E.E., tugging at the knot of a splashy tie, beckoned him in. Phelan took the chair in front of the desk. For a few minutes, they exchanged sad information about Phelan's grandmother, E.E.'s mother-in-law, who was fading from cancer. Then E.E. cleared his throat. “So I got to hear 'bout my nephew through the grapevine. Whyn't you come tell me you wasn't going back to the rigs?”

“Because lemme tell you how that conversation woulda gone. ‘Ride that G.I. to college, Tom. Get yourself a banker job, Tom.' If I'd asked you about joining the force, you'd of hemmed and hawed. ‘Well, what about the Forest Service, E.E.?'—that woulda got a horse laugh.” Phelan did his E.E. imitation: “‘Hide out in the Big Thicket? Look for fires in all that swamp wawtah? That sound like
le bon temps
to you, Tom?'”

“Aw.” His uncle spread out his elbows on the desk, pretended to consider. Then said, “Yeah, you got that about right.”

“You been good to me, E.E. Don't think I ever told you that before.”

His uncle blinked at him in surprise. Edouard Etienne Guidry, solid-built, silver-haired, creased olive skin, deep blue suit and a tie like a light show behind Jefferson Airplane. “I stole the angel in your family, Tom. I don't be good to you, who gonna be, tell me that.” E.E. laced thick fingers. “Private investigation. You takin' on bitter stuff and stupid stuff and dirty-nasty stuff. I know what I'm talking about.”

“You the only person I know personally knows what he's talking about. You telling me none a your day is bitter and stupid?”

“Bitter and stupid with a pension, cher.”

Phelan held out his right palm.

For a moment, he thought he might just sit there, ear-rims burning, palm extended. But after a noisy sigh, E.E. slapped it.

Blessed, Phelan left his uncle's office and gave a see-you-later salute to George Fontenot. “Gonna catch Dennis Deeterman, Sergeant?”

“Tracasse-toi pas. Chaque chien aura son jour et son jour vient.”

“Swear, y'all speak more French than English down here. All I got out a that was
dog
and
day
.”

“Said that dog, his day is coming. When your uncle gonna learn you a language with some culture?”